Music breaking barriers

Augustn’t: A Short Intermission

Some of you know I’ve been working on finding and reviewing music for this site for many years now. It’s a very time-consuming effort, which has been possible for me since I was still at school, had a flexible schedule, and could listen to music all day while doing other stuff. My morning schedule is basically this: wake up, read emails for interesting promotions and albums, update facebook and other websites where music news can be shared, catch up on the new releases from bandcamp, and then get to listen to all that sounded promising and decide whether or not to listen to it in its entirety at a later point. Depending on the day of the week, this can take me from about half an hour to multiple hours. Fridays are usually the most filled days, and Saturdays too because of catching up on some missed Friday releases. Actually, when you put it in a chart, you can see that Fridays see about five times more releases than any other day of the week.

Percentage of releases per day of publishing in 2017.

Just for the record, the current graph for 2018 is very similar.

I’m not complaining, however. I still love doing this and discovering new musical gems nearly every day! I love having access to future releases in advance and helping bands promote their music when I enjoy it myself; either by reviewing it or by putting up an exclusive premiere. However, as my student life soon comes to an end, I fear I might not be able to keep this schedule up. Maybe I’ll be able to change it around so that nothing is lost, but most probably I’ll have less time to allocate to music-searching and listening. Trust me, if a Basic Universal Income program was available, all I’d do is listening to and making music…

This way of life, if you can call it that, means that I have social media open all day long: constantly keeping an eye on facebook, emails, reddit, and so on. This gets exhausting, and keeps me away from other things I would like to allocate time to: reading, walking, contemplating, or quite simply doing nothing! So, I’ve chosen the month of August to take a small break away from social media and music-seeking. It won’t be the whole month, I want to go away for two weeks and do a little bit of resourcing. Perhaps I’ll extend that to three weeks, but I don’t want to miss an entire month of music, so I’ll come back and catch up on all that I’ve missed during that month, so I can still come up with my own recommendations and playlist.

Percentage of releases per month of publishing in 2017.

This graph shows how many albums are released for each month of the year. The data is the 2017 albums I’ve listened to, but it reflects the bigger picture of all the albums I’ve listened to (something like 8,000 albums). You can clearly see the “August slump”, although it’s not as drastic as the one in December and January. (That opens up the possibility of doing another one of these short intermissions of service during winter.) I thought this was a better time than any other to take a small break from duty.

Like I said: don’t worry. If your primary source of musical discovery is this website, I will come back in late August and catch up on the month. If you want no interruption of service, let me recommend you to visit Heavy Blog Is Heavy, Toilet ov Hell, and It Djents as alternatives, and there are many other smaller websites that are at least as interesting as those. I unfortunately don’t follow many so I couldn’t recommend more. I recommend a small break from social media and music, if you can afford it.

So, whatever you decide, I wish you the best, and we’ll see each other in a few weeks! Cheers!